


Her little boy

by mahkent



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Hospitalization, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-12 19:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16001879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahkent/pseuds/mahkent
Summary: Janet knows her little boy is different.





	1. Janet knows her little boy is different.

**Author's Note:**

> au where Janet doesn't give Tim up.

Janet knows her little boy is different. 

He's slow, or so the teachers say. When he brings home schoolwork he stares at it and _tries_ , damnit, she sees him trying and she explains to the teachers at his school that he's trying but it doesn't get anywhere except him frustrated and his homework unfinished. 

The worst part is how his brain seems to excel at imagining things that aren't there, instead of excelling at something as simple as reading. _The man_ , he calls it. Never quite describing it as anything that she could understand because he would be babbling and sobbing as he tried; she has to hold him tightly, giving him something to ground himself on, warding away the monsters she can't see and that don't exist.

It gets worse, and worse, and worse. First the hallucinations- because that's what they are- then delusions, he's paranoid and scared and it all culminates with a sudden bout of aggression. Violence- her little boy in the kitchen, he stands on tip toes to grab a knife from the block and charges.

Her little boy with dark eyes of flame and his teeth pulled back in a dark snarl, he attacks her. The knife hits her flesh- it's dull, though, so she isn't necessarily _hurt_ by it. She's hurt by how her little boy seems to be an animal right now. His little hands wrap around her neck, the knife clattering to the floor; it's such a good thing for once that he's too small for his age. It allows her to throw him off and then grab him, holding him tight to her chest. The animal rage in her poor little boy comes out in him snarling _no_. A struggle, but he's too small to get out of her grasp. He can't escape her carrying him to the bathroom and barricading him in there.

That's the day she decides her poor little Timothy needs help.

* * *

Dropping him off is the worst part. Even packing up all of his things isn't that awful, because he's convinced that they're going on a vacation- almost delirious recently, he doesn't understand the context of it. Her poor little boy doesn't know that her not packing means she's not going with him. 

Her poor little Timothy says _mommy, where are you going?_ when she signs her name on the dotted line to give the doctors the rights to care for him. She's still legally his mother, she just has to wait until they say she can visit her own goddamn son. And Timothy just keeps asking what's going on, her little boy is confused and holding onto her like he's afraid she'll turn to smoke between his little fingers if he doesn't.

She walks out. She leaves her son behind as he sniffles and starts to cry, hiding her own tears behind promises that she'll visit as often she can.

She makes good on that promise, of course. She watches her sunny, scared son turn into a child so drugged he barely recognizes her at times because of the fog in his head. If he can speak, if he does recognize her, he's tired; he talks of being locked in his room for months on end, he talks of swapping medicines to see what will stop his seizures. He has seizures, sometimes; he'll seem to get distracted, then her little boy (not so little, he's growing so fast now) slumps over and twitches and drools because his body is attacking itself. She gets used to getting him on the floor, pushing him onto his side while the nurses run and get the medication to stop it- but she still has to watch her son suffer.

She watches him fade and wither into a husk of himself. The drugs numb him, he says; the drugs make him confused, sometimes so confused he doesn't remember how to speak. Sometimes it makes him so exhausted that he can only lay in the stupid hospital bed. And sometimes, sometimes he says they don't work; he has seizure upon seizure upon seizure, he wakes up screaming his throat raw and with his fingers scraped bloody by his clawing at things he doesn't remember.

Then she watches him get better. The hospital burns down, but he moves to another facility and he's _better_. Her sweet little boy is a young man, now, and he can talk to her. He loves playing guitar, he loves going to the real school he's allowed to, and he doesn't mind when she hugs him anymore. He doesn't see the terrible beings his mind created. He's _healthy_.

Her little boy (because he'll always be that, even though he's fifteen now and taller than her) is healthy. He makes a friend, a boy named Brian who towers over both of them. She's halfway convinced that this Brian boy is _more_ than a friend; she can see how her son hangs onto every word Brian says, she can see how Brian is so much more physical with Tim than he lets anyone else be. Arms wrapped around shoulders, faces pressed together, her son and his friend are so close that it warms her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, i watched marble hornets finally! my two favorites survived but at what cost. also, i like brian. the masked man and the hooded man were dope but i kind of want to focus on tim and brian and such directly.
> 
> favorite episode is probably when tim and jay go to the hospital and tim has that breakdown and explains his past because the acting was so fucking interesting, like perfectly twitchy and shaky and stuff.
> 
> wanted to have fun with tim's past. this is more of a broad brush chapter, the next ones will be focused on more specific events.


	2. Hospital, 12/21/96

A year and a day since she put her little boy in the hospital. Janet watched him wither and fade into a shell of the bright little boy he was. Janet let it happen.

Janet still visits him, even if it aches deep in her chest when she sees how she's failed him. Today, he's sitting in his bed; the child rails up like he's four instead of eight, now. (She missed his eighth birthday because she was working. The doctors sent her a letter saying he was catatonic for a week afterwards.) Her little boy’s face is entirely blank, his eyes moving to her when the door opens.

He looks, frankly, like shit. She's taken aback by how thin he seems- he's not thin, really, he's always been a heavier child but the shadows under his eyes make him seem so gaunt- and how his eyes don't really focus. They're blank, fogged over by countless drugs the doctors push into his hands. A second or two passes before he even seems to notice she's actually there. There's no emotional reaction, though; he blinks slowly as if even that little movement exhausts him completely, and that's all she gets. No greeting, no smile, nothing. “Hey, sweetie,” She says as she sits. “Are you alright? You seem tired.” 

Talking seems like such an effort for him. He tilts his head down - more of letting his chin fall, muscles too weak to support him - and manages to string together a basic sentence. “New meds,” his voice is rough and quiet and so not her _son_. That's all he says, though, as if a change of meds should render him borderline unconscious.

It makes her wonder what exactly she signed her son over to. The doctors explain some things, but the endless lists of drugs with names utterly unpronounceable winds up being meaningless to her. The lists of side effects when she looks them up are so _long_ and horrific (suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, paranoia, how the hell will the medication help him if it just exacerbated his current symptoms?) that's she's stopped looking.

Her little boy now, though, is suffering. He's breathing slowly and steadily but it's meaningless when all of the life is sapped right out of his fragile body. It tears her apart to see him so _weak_. The symptoms she sees- lethargy, confusion, not being mentally anywhere near where he should be? It makes her want to take him from the hospital, bring him home where he might be safer and better.

But she knows it won't help. He's too ill, his brain too busy attacking itself to bother letting him function like he should. He's too prone to seizures and sudden outbursts. She's failed him, she knows, by not getting help as soon as his imaginary friends turned into monsters in the corner.

He doesn't react much to her after he mentions the meds. His eyes are so far away, his body is lax as if moving is too much effort for him, and he doesn't smile even when she tries to make him laugh. Her little boy just sits there and struggles not to fade into the nothingness the doctors have prescribed to him. 

She leaves more alone than she was before.

* * *

A day later she gets a phone call from the hospital. _Your son is gone,_ they say, _and we don’t know how he escaped. His door is still locked and no one saw him leave._

It's a familiar panic, this. She knew it a year ago when he disappeared then, simply not showing up at home after school. She called the cops, her friends, and they found him confused in the forest. Covered in mud and blood (his own, hopefully). That's where she tells them to look this time. She leaves to look, too.

It's an awful feeling. The anxiety nestled in her chest that her little boy is _gone_ , lost and alone somewhere out there; it sets her hands quivering as she drives to the hospital, as they (she and the few nurses they could spare) split up to find him. They've already searched the hospital, so they decide to look in the park he ran off to only once before.

Rosswood. She found a journal of his, after she abandoned him in the damned hospital; in it was Rosswood repeating. In his horrible handwriting, letters jumbled (she was always convinced he was dyslexic), Rosswood Rosswood Rosswood. He loved that park. He'd spend hours on the swings when he was younger; he'd run around on those trails as she tried to keep up with him. He'd stay until it was almost dark and she coaxed him to go home.

Now the forests surrounding the park are more overgrown than before, somehow. Trees arching across the paths, their branches connected in a twisted canopy, tree roots growing through what trail there is left. It's not a place she ever wants her son lost in. The noises are only of birds and bugs at first. Then she hears a whimper. 

That awful quiet whimper precedes a scream of agony. The source, when she whips her head around, is her little boy; he's curled on the ground against a tree. He's shaking too hard for her to see much else, shaking his head and struggling against unseen evil. It's only when she approaches him does she see the most concerning part. 

Black tar on his lips and down his chest and dripping from his eyes, sealing them shut as he howls in blistering pain that she could never fully understand. Blood on his fingers because he's clawed his nails off against trees, probably, or perhaps off against his skin. That's scratched raw too where it isn't covered in mud- the poor boy, he's panicking and his screams die into choking when he can’t breathe through the tar in his throat. 

The sounds alert the nurses. The two of them, one a slight man and the other an older woman, they run over and stop in their tracks. The tar on his lips slides so slowly down his chin; her poor little boy struggles, but his movements are slowly growing weaker and weaker. With his eyes glued shut with tar (what _is_ it? It's dripping out of his nose, now, seeping down his skin and staining it black) he can't see her. He probably can't hear her either.

She kneels by her son. Despite how he writhes, terrified and whining when he isn't choking, he relaxes into her touch- he still _remembers_ her, thank god- and doesn't fight being lifted. Instead, he just curls into her grasp and chokes so hard it triggers a coughing fit that shakes his fragile little body. 

The hospital isn't too far. She gets in the car and puts her baby boy in the back seat, allowing the nurses to fuss over him - trying to clear his throat, maybe, keeping him on his side and watching him choke up the tar - as she drives far too fast. The speed limit is entirely meaningless when she hears Tim start sobbing through the tar in his eyes, his throat. 

They get back to the hospital. Her poor little boy is bundled up and moved to the emergency unit, and when she tries to follow she isn't allowed to. That goddamn nurse puts a hand on her chest and says _ma’am, please-_ as if she's being unreasonable about wanting to see her son alive and well. 

She sits in that damned waiting room. She waits, and waits, losing hope every second she thinks about her son dying scared and blind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tim :(


	3. Eight years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Janet is not a good mother.

Timothy is fifteen when she's allowed to bring him back home.

Of course, she had to move. She couldn't afford the hospital (the _asylum_ , her brain hisses at her) bills and the large house that was far too empty without her little boy. The new house is smaller, though she's set up Timothy’s bedroom how it was when she sent him away- blue bedspread, space themed, with glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. She threw all of his old clothes out because they certainly wouldn't fit and bought him new ones. She's prepared so much for him.

At the hospital, when she's signing form after form, her little boy stands next to her. He isn't so little anymore, standing almost to her shoulder, hair long and messy. He's still and silent as he watches her fill the forms out. Despite being _better_ , he still doesn't seem much like himself anymore. He's so listless. Even as she leads him to the car, out of the asylum she signed him over to years ago, he doesn't react outside of a faint, bitter smile.

In the car he remains silent. She looks over often- her son is staring out of the window, watching the landscapes rush by as she drives them home. It's a solid ten minutes before he says anything, his voice quiet and rough. “Why'd you leave me?”

It's a question he's never asked before, not when he was lucid and able to understand anything beyond the terror of his hallucinations. It's a question she doesn't have a good answer for. She knows damn well what they did to him- electroshock, painful and wholly useless, endless drugs that forced him into numbness and forced him to lose himself to the pull of pitch black nothing. She knows that she signed the forms, she watched them take her little boy away and turn him into a husk. 

Silence reigns. He turns to stare at her, eyes dull and tired but so much more alive than they've been in years. Cold rage, old, old rage burns in her son’s eyes; he waits patiently. Eight years he's been waiting. 

“I... you needed _help_ , sweetie. I couldn't give it to you. They could.” It's the truth, as weak as it seems. She could have done something different, she knows. She could have paid more and gotten him into a better place (she should have), she could have visited more often (she should have), she could have tried anything else. (She wishes she did.) 

“Oh, you mean they could drug me into oblivion.” His voice is pure venom. When she glances over to look, his brows are furrowed and his dark eyes pointed straight ahead are now roiling fire from the rage coursing through him. Eight years. _Eight years_ , he's broken from being effectively abandoned. Her poor little boy is a shattered teenager, now.

“No, Timothy-” She starts. He's right, he's so _right_ that she can't make up any excuses that could possibly rationalize what she gave him away to. She saw how they cycled through drug after drug and none of them worked well enough to stop the horrors of his hallucinations, not until the most recent round of drugs managed to keep him lucid.

“Shut up.” He hisses, fixing her with a glare that could level a goddamn mountain for a few seconds before he looks back out at the window. His body is pressed against the door, as far away from her as it can be, but she can't say she blames him.

The silence is tense, but neither of them break it for fear of breaking the satisfaction of Timothy being free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tim was put into hospital at age seven, in late 1995; got out late 2003, age fifteen. eight years.


End file.
